J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

facts and the ‘soft technology’ of our aesthetic and cultural engagement is itself one of
the central objects of study here. To what extent is the numinous quality of a great
work of art—its ‘aura’, as Walter Benjamin might say—susceptible to analysis?
Robert Schumann took it for granted that to ‘apply ladders to the Colossus in order to
measure it by ells’ was an absurd undertaking; but absurd or not, it seems to me there
is no better way of finding out the capabilities and limitations of analysis. 8
If these kinds of inquiry could be summarised under the question of what these
works mean to us, the other central theme here is the question of what they may have
meant to their composers. 9 How did these fugues come to be? Perseverance with an
apparently moribund genre such as fugue raises this question in an especially pressing
form, as expressed so pungently by Richard Wagner at the head of the chapter. Why
did composers seek neither the easy rewards of contemporary popularity, nor the more
difficult satisfaction of ‘taking the era by the ears, and honestly trying to cultivate its
modern forms.’ 10 Why persist with a genre that surely had nothing new to say to their
age? Why did composers insist upon ‘shewing their learnedness’, in ‘wrestling with
the German devil’?
What (for example) did Haydn hope to achieve by introducing no less than
three strict fugues into his op.20 string quartets; and why did he write only one
thereafter? Why, conversely, did Mozart undertake so many yet finish so few? What
was the significance of fugue to Beethoven in 1794 when he was studying with
Albrechtsberger? And how does this compare to its significance twenty years later
when he returned to the genre? What was it that made Samuel Wesley gravitate so
decisively to the music of J. S. Bach?
8 R. Schumann, review of F. Hiller’s Études, op.15 (1835), The musical world of Robert Schumann, tr.
and ed. H. Pleasants (London: Gollancz, 1965), p.36.
9 This distinction parallels that made by E. D. Hirsch between a text’s meaning (i.e. what the author
intended) and its significance (what it has come to mean for us); see Validity in interpretation (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).
10 Wagner, ‘Deutsche Oper’, 58.
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